Plan Your Trip to Zion

Recommendations

Zion National Park

A bajillion years ago, ancient iterations of the Virgin River started wreaking havoc on the sandstone in southwestern Utah. Now there’s a faint “You’re welcome” echoing through the canyons of Zion National Park.

Plan Your Trip to Zion

Recommendations

Zion National Park is like the set of a movie that’s so grand you know it’s fake, but you don’t care because it’s delicious to look at; the kind of flick where the art director was given carte blanche and didn’t worry about believability. Something campy about chiseled space-canyoneers colonizing the loveliest side of the Red Planet. Read more...

Zion is for hikers

From three miles up, the Zion National Park map looks like a naughty geometry student’s desk after protractor unit. The crosshatch of canyons scratched in this step of the Grand Staircase makes for a hundred trails in all kinds of contexts, at all levels of difficulty. To some, “hiking” means walking along sidewalk-grade paths into pretty nature. To others, a claustrophobic slot canyon to a chain-anchored ascent of a vertiginous pinnacle is a “hike.” Zion is for hikers.

Zion superlatives

Zion is both the oldest and the oldest national park in Utah. It was the state’s first federally designated park (1919), and it shows off the oldest geologic layers this side of the Grand Canyon (~150m years old). It’s also Utah’s most visited national park, drawing 3+ million visitors annually. (Book a trip from November to April to dodge the heat and the crowds.) And, finally, Zion is the best Utah national park, in a five-way tie with all the others.

Zion means “the heavenly city” and the park’s Kolob Canyons are named after a place described in Mormon scripture as being near God’s throne. There are no churches in Zion National Park, but there’s plenty to inspire reverence.